The economic warfare on Iran isn't changing the positions of the leadership, which maintains its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta admitted on Monday that increasingly harsh economic sanctions on Iran have not altered Iran’s position, but he still argued for more of it.

“These sanctions are having a serious impact in terms of the economy in Iran,” he said. “And while the results of that may not be obvious at the moment, the fact is that they have expressed a willingness to negotiate and they continue to seem interested in trying to find a diplomatic solution,” he said.

Actually, they’ve been expressing interest in an diplomatic solution for years in the face of US intransigence. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Iranian concessions, which have included stopping all 20% uranium enrichment, are “non-starters.”

After the failed talks in 2009 and 2010, wherein Obama ended up rejecting the very deal he demanded the Iranians accept, as Harvard professor Stephen Walt has written, the Iranian leadership “has good grounds for viewing Obama as inherently untrustworthy.” Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar has concurred, arguing that Iran has “ample reason” to believe, “ultimately the main Western interest is in regime change.”

Panetta shouldn’t act surprised: historically speaking, sanctions are very ineffective. Renowned international relations theorist Kenneth Waltz recently wrote in Foreign Affairs that “the current sanctions on Iran can be dropped,” since “they primarily harm ordinary Iranians, with little purpose.”

“The Iranian government is unlikely to buckle due to Western pressure. And it is even less likely to back down in the face of domestic pressure,” Mohammad Ali Shabani, based in Tehran, writes at Al Jazeera.

The sanctions placed on the Iranian economy have ushered in runaway inflation, cuts in government subsidies, and high unemployment. The supposed purpose behind the economic warfare is to pressure Iran away from developing nuclear weapons, even though Washington admits Iran has no weapons program and has not made the decision to start one.

The sanctions are having impoverishing effects on millions of innocent Iranians. “Prices of fruit and sugar, among other staples, have soared – in some cases showing threefold and fourfold increases,” writes Saeed Kamali Dehghan in the Guardian. “The price of meat, an essential ingredient of Iranian food, has gone up to such an extent that many now eat it only on special occasions.”

Even though the punitive measures don’t directly target supplies such as medicines, sick Iranians in desperate need of life-saving medicines have been met with shortages.

The harsh and irrational economic measures could also have the effect of making conflict more likely. Columbia University Professor Gary Sick has called the sanctions effort “the equivalent of a blockade. It’s an act of war.” Trita Parsi, of the National Iranian American Council, wrote back in March that “the sanctions strategy on Iran will very soon reach [the] point” of escalating the situation with Iran to one of “two policies: Regime change or war. Or Both.”

Mr. Pannetta, you need to show something to the Zionism for them to believe that you are doing something so they can vote for your boss. There is only two form of international help that US “democratic" candidates will get in this 2012 election, one is from Saudis feudalism and the other from the US zionism. The ordinary amrican people can be fooled if Obama start mimicking Dr. Martin Luther King again, which I don’t think that he will, because people have noticed that he is about the word “hope” with no wish list attached and a falsified democracy with more war as principals then democracy and its principals.

If they had a peace prize for Nations, the U.S. would never get one! That their current President has a Peace Prize is either the world's biggest irony or the world's biggest joke. Perhaps it's both!

Claus Eric Hamle

Godfather Obama is a war criminal. Bush/Obama have turned the US into a banana republic. A rogue state. Fallujah is worse than Hiroshima. In Iraq US Army kidnapped small boys and their mothers. They raped the boys and forced their mothers to watch while it was filmed by a female soldier. They are worse than the Nazis !

curmudgeonvt

They knew from the beginning that sanctions would disproportionately affect the typical citizen. But the American people couldn't be told the devastating affect on the general population sanctions would cause because then they might object to such inhumane treatment and that might hinder the plan to humiliate the Iranians. The Iranians have never been an existential threat to the American people – well, until now anyway. The Archons have to have enemies for the American people to focus on…

Dean

US foreign policy in general is massive failure. Iran will ignore the West's criminal sanctions because they have no rule of law behind them. The BRIC nations have ignored the sanctions as do most of the world. The US is nothing more than a bully who does not win war's, but starts them only to see them expose the weakness, and resolve of the US as a whole.

Why doesn't the American Government release photographs of starving Iranian children to prove just how effective the sanctions are? They have plenty of spies in Iran so it wouldn't be difficult to get some.

To get photos of Iranian people who are dying because they can't get drugs shouldn't be too hard either!